An Emotional Holocaust Lesson

Area Teachers Hear Survivors' Accounts

MCHENRY COUNTY — On March 8, 1943, John Fink was 22 years old when the Nazi Gestapo arrested him in Berlin. Four days later he was on his way to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

Frieda "Fritzie" Weiss was just 13 when she and her family were uprooted from their home in Czechoslovakia and sent to Auschwitz to be killed or forced into slave labor.

Both Fink and Weiss were arrested simply because they were Jewish.

In advance of Sunday's countywide Diversity Day, Fink and Weiss were invited to participate in a daylong seminar in the McHenry County Government Center attended by about 30 area teachers.

Sponsored by Donald Englert, regional superintendent of schools; Lisa Derman, president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois; and Werner Ellman, vice chairman of the McHenry County Human Relations Council, Tuesday's program was designed to put a human face on the history-book accounts of the internment of Jews by the Nazis.

German-born Ellman grew up in Chicago and, as a member of the U.S. 11th Armored Division, helped liberate Mauthausen, a Nazi work camp in Austria, in 1945.

"I feel shame [for what I saw there]," an emotional Ellman told the group. "This was my heritage. ... I had never gone more than six blocks from my house [in Chicago] before I went into the Army, and then to suddenly have these experiences. It was awful. I've always felt a sense of guilt."

Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, Weiss recalled, she was separated from her mother and 7-year-old brother, both of whom she would never see again.

Her 90-year old grandfather had died in one of the overcrowded boxcars en route to the camp.

"I remember asking, `When will I see my mother?' and they showed me the smoke," Weiss recalled for the group, pointing as if to a chimney for the crematorium still fixed in her mind.

Soon after arriving at Auschwitz, Weiss said, a frail, old woman approached her.

"She was my mother's younger sister," Weiss said. She had been there a year, "and I didn't recognize her."

Weiss said that in many ways, she owed her life to her emaciated aunt.

"She said, `Tomorrow will be better.' We lived for `tomorrow will be better,'" Weiss said. "If it were not for her, I would not be here."

A fit and alert 80-year-old, Fink traced Nazi atrocities to 1933, when Adolf Hitler took power.

"I lived under the Nazi regime for 12 long years," Fink said, "There was a lot of killing going on--against Jews, Social Democrats, Jehovah's Witnesses. ... Our language does not lend itself to express the horror under the Nazis."

Fink and Weiss said they had been reluctant to talk about their experiences for years and only lately have been willing to open up.

"I realized the importance of standing up and speaking out so that you can teach your children and your grandchildren," said Weiss, adding that her son goaded her to do so.

Although the number of attendees was relatively small Tuesday, and despite his own reluctance to talk about the subject, Ellman was upbeat about the likely success of the program.

"There are, what, about 30 people here?" he said. "I multiply that into a thousand students."